Super Sonic Transport
A Super Sonic Transport (or SST) was a type of vehicle developed by The Cabal between 909 and 912. The knowledge used to construct these vehicles was provided by spirits, in violation of the Prohibition of Off-world Technology. Precise details of the vehicles' makeup are unknown, though they are said to have been made predominantly from a high duty aluminum alloy. Maximum speed for an SST was close to 1500 miles per hour, making it nearly nineteen times faster than flying spell devices such as enchanted wagons. Maximum occupancy was 500 people. In LY 912, Colonel Stavros Supprus liberated one such vehicle, which had been constructed in a secret facility near the Army's base in Kimrin, of which he himself was commander. According to Supprus, the SST's construction had been supervised by one of the officers under his command, Major Shirona Monogwrangle. Supprus had been kept out of the loop on this project, as his own superior (General Tovan Middlebury) knew him to be the kind of man who would expose such a project to the authorities. However, Supprus had become suspicious because of rumors among the general public of "UFO" sightings. (UFO is a Terran term which stands for "unidentified flying object," commonly used in Earth's fiction of their own 20th and 21st centuries to refer to alien spaceships.) These rumors prompted his investigations, which led him to discover the existence of the Cabal. After liberating the one which had been built in Kimrin, he and a number of his most trusted soldiers, accompanied by Mattholomew Protestant, flew to Near Port to rescue members of The Chaos, who had been illegally imprisoned there three months earlier, by Colonel Charles Woodman. Supprus, his allies, the Chaos, and another prisoner, Vallus Orator, flew toward Triscot, ultimately intending to deliver the SST to the authorities in First Village, as proof of the Cabal's existence and its illegal activities. However, they were pursued by a second SST, which had been constructed in Near Port under the supervision of Col. Woodman. Supprus's SST was shot down by the enemy, but all passengers managed to escape via flying carpet. The enemy SST was then shot down itself, though it is unknown how this was accomplished. Later, Supprus attempted to show the wreckage of both vessels to the Triscot police, but by then the wreckage had vanished. It would later turn out all traces of the SSTs had been destroyed by order of Phineas Daily, the head of the Cabal. Shortly prior to the Chaos War, a bubble recording was discovered hidden in the former office of Bishop Kizin Planner of Monab (currently the office of Bishop Mallory Secundus), in which it was revealed that Planner had become aware of the Cabal's existence at some point, and began secretly investigating the SST project in late 909 or early 910. It was this investigation which led to his murder by Durell Turner. (Until the recording was uncovered, his death was believed to have been of natural causes.) It was another magical recording, made by Zeke Sanguine, which found its way into the hands of Darius Lonewander in the midst of the Chaos War. This recording led General Middlebury and Admiral Althis Portman to turn against the Cabal, when the recording revealed an event from 904, before either of them had joined the group: the Laser Plot, long believed to have been perpetrated by Protestant terrorists after the end of the Coming of the Order, turned out to have been conducted instead by the Cabal. If not for this revelation changing Middlebury and Portman's hearts, Supprus's claims about the SSTs might never have been substantiated. However, once the general and admiral admitted their involvement in the Cabal, they shared all their knowledge of the Cabal with InterVil, including the existence of the SST project. There was a third SST constructed in Port, but it disappeared before it could be confiscated by the authorities. Presumably, it was destroyed by the Cabal, just as the first two had been. See also *Transportation Category:Science